1. Technical Field
The present application relates generally to configuring or reconfiguring characteristics of an electronics device, and more particularly to securely configuring the electronics device without knowledge of the configuration command therefor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's electronics devices are sophisticated machines, performing numerous operations oftentimes through use of a controller executing embedded firmware. There are times when it is desired to change specific sensitive settings in an electronics device in a secured and controlled fashion in order to protect the device from unauthorized attacks by hackers. In the case of an imaging device such as a printer, it may be desirous to change the region setting or cartridge set that is accepted by the printer. Due to the advanced state of reverse engineering, storing a symmetric key or private key on the printer or on a client machine's disk greatly reduces the complexity involved in stealing the key. Therefore, a secure signing system should be put in place in order to protect the stored key(s). Flexibility and additions drive additional cost in new infrastructure or in the printer's components. In this specific case, adding a new printer model/Network Protocol Alliance (NPA) command would require an infrastructure change.
In protocols commonly used today, a piece of data is signed by one party and then verified by another party in order to be authentic. In this case, both parties need to know the data that is being transferred. For example, a printer (the device) may be initially configured to be a printer for a first OEM customer and therefore only accept cartridges from the first OEM. To change that printer to accept cartridges from a different OEM customer, a command (xxyyzz) is sent to the printer. To verify that the command is valid and sent from a known source, the command is signed and then sent to the printer using a private and public key pair. Upon reception of the signature, the printer then verifies the validity of the signature and changes its configuration to accept different OEM cartridges.
To further improve the security, the printer's unique serial number can be used which binds the signature to only that specific printer. To perform this operation, the signing party must know the command that the printer accepts and read the serial number from the printer. This requires knowledge of the commands the printer accepts and how to read the serial number. Specifically, knowledge of what data is to be changed, the new data values and the command to perform the change are necessary for each particular configuration capable of being changed. For a number of different models of devices provided by a manufacturer, the knowledge necessary to be able to suitably configure each device of each device model becomes a significant undertaking.
Based upon the foregoing, there is a need for an improved process for configuring an electronics device, such as a printer.